Mark Guzdial
Professor, School of Interactive Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Helping Everyone Create with Computing

Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Building 3 Auditorium - 11:00 AM
(Coffee and cookies at 10:30 AM)

Computer science education at the post-secondary level worldwide is aimed at the future IT professional, but all knowledge-building professionals need to be able to create with computing. Professionals in IT are a small piece of the audience for computing education - an estimate from Carnegie Mellon University suggests that by 2012 there will be some 13 million end-user programmers in the United States, compared to an estimated 3 million professional software developers. In this talk, I talk about how to address that much greater audience, to make more successful the non-IT professional who uses computer science. Our field has had a goal of teaching everyone on campus about computer science for over 40 years. Recent work in my group provides evidence that end-user programmers want what we have to offer, but we need to develop new kinds of approaches to teaching CS to meet their needs and constraints. I will present methods for teaching computing that have improved success rates for non-computing majors (while still including programming), such as contextualized computing education.

Mark Guzdial (link is external)is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology. His research focuses on learning sciences and technology, specifically, computing education research. He has published several books on the use of media as a context for learning computing. He was the original developer of the "Swiki" which was the first wiki designed for educational use. He received a joint Ph.D. degree in Education and Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1993. He serves on the ACM's Education Council and the Special Interest Group in CS Education (SIGCSE) Board, and is on the editorial boards of the "Journal of the Learning Sciences," "ACM Transactions on Computing Education," and "Communications of the ACM." With his wife and colleague, Barbara Ericson, he received the 2010 ACM Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator award. He was also the recipient of the 2012 IEEE Computer Society Undergraduate Teaching Award.

Other links: blog, largest project, longest project, newest project

IS&T Colloquium Committee Host: Blanche Meeson

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